The disconnect between rising short and low long interest rates has been a distinctive feature of the 2000s. Both research and policy circles have argued that international forces, such as global monetary policy (e.g. Rogoff, 2006); international business cycles (e.g. Borio and Filardo, 2007);...

This paper evaluates the e¤ects of policy interventions on sectoral labour markets and the aggregate economy in a business cycle model with search and matching frictions. We extend the canonical model by including capital-skill complementarity in production, labour mar- kets with skilled and...

Most of the literature estimating DSGE models for monetary policy analysis assume that policy follows a simple rule. In this paper we allow policy to be described by various forms of optimal policy - commitment, discretion and quasi-commitment. We find that, even after allowing for Markov...

This paper analyses optimal income taxes over the business cycle under a balanced-budget restriction, for low, middle and high income agents. A model incorporating capital-skill complementarity in pro- duction and differential access to capital and labour markets is de- veloped to capture the...

This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantita- tive properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity, endogenous skill formation and stochastic shocks to public consumption as well as total factor and...

In models with a representative infinitely lived household, modern versions of tax smoothing imply that the steady-state of government debt should follow a random walk. This is unlikely to be the case in OLG economies, where, the equilibrium interest rate may differ from the policy-maker’s...

The unconditional expectation of social welfare is often used to assess alternative macroeconomic policy rules in applied quantative research. It is shown that it is generally possible to derive a linear-quadratic problem that approximates the exact non-linear porblem where the unconditional...

Employing an endogenous growth model with human capital, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment and hours. Given the importance of accounting for both the...

Existing evidence about the effectiveness of money growth to stimulate economic activity has been criticized from different perspectives. In addition, high correlation between money and output is not helpful to detect the direction of causality. From a policy perspective, in fact, positive...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between rent-seeking behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill, which is taken to represent the rent component. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals...